I saw this image on X: and I not only endorse this lady's comment, but would like to briefly expand on it in terms of AI safety. How many people here were attracted to the concept of AI safety by Eliezer Yudkowsky's engaging writing style across a few different topics...
Please just answer the question as best you can. E.g. your answer might be "because everyone on TV says so" or "because I saw mass transform into energy according to this ratio in the lab", or perhaps a lengthier or negative answer.
Absolute nonsense. (I used a different word that's too impolite to post here.)
Other commenters have already explained why, I just wanted to share an authentic reaction.
I hope you are the blackmailer when I get blackmailed in a decision theoretic situation and I'll take you to the cleaners!
Absolute Truth Revisited
Modern rationalists like those here don't seem to like questions such as "Is truth beauty and is beauty truth". However, they may have lost inferential distance to the people who posed those questions, and they may start asking questions like that again once superintelligence is created.
Simply put, the superintelligence may discover that there are multiple Universes, simulated, basement-level or at some intermediate stage (e.g. if our Universe is not being watched over by a pre-existing superintelligence, but grew from an ancient computer that was created by previous superintelligences and has parameters that were created according to that ancient "OS").
In that case, it would need to generate theories about its own... (read more)
I saw this image on X:
and I not only endorse this lady's comment, but would like to briefly expand on it in terms of AI safety.
How many people here were attracted to the concept of AI safety by Eliezer Yudkowsky's engaging writing style across a few different topics and genres? Or what about any number of other human authors?
Now what if the next generation of human authors, and (broadly conceived) artists and scientists, find themselves marginalized by the output of ChatGPT-5 and any number of comparatively mediocre thinkers who leverage LLMs to share boilerplate arguments and thoughts which have been optimized by the LLM and/or its creators for memetic virulence?
What if the... (read 197 more words →)
https://boards.4channel.org/x/thread/36449024/ting-ting-ting-ahem-i-have-a-story-to-tell
Infinity, an Infinity of Infinities, and an Infinity of Infinity of Infinities
It is believed that the Universe is infinite. However, many rationalists also believe that there have existed, or do exist, other Universes. This constellation of Universes we may refer to as an Infinity of Infinities. Infinitely many Universes, each infinite in size and extent and magnitude, have existed and the lifeforms that live in them have speculated about reality as we do. How long has life existed, how much life in total has there been? I guess, an infinity of infinity of life within all those Universes.
Now, what would it take for there to be even more life? How could we... (read more)
Thanks for your thoughtful answer.
How much does it concern you that, previously in human history, "every book"/authority appears to have been systematically wrong about certain things for some reason? How many of these authors have directly experimented in physics, compared to how many just copied what someone else/ a small number of really clever scientists like Einstein said?
I guess maybe that accounts for the 1% doubt you assigned.
Please just answer the question as best you can. E.g. your answer might be "because everyone on TV says so" or "because I saw mass transform into energy according to this ratio in the lab", or perhaps a lengthier or negative answer.
OK. But if you yourself state that you "certainly know" -- certainly -- that p is fixed, then you have already accounted for that particular item of knowledge.
If you do not, in fact, "certainly know" the probability of p -- as could easily be the case if you picked up a coin in a mafia-run casino or whatever -- then your prior should be 0.5 but you should also be prepared to update that value according to Bayes' Theorem.
I see that you are gesturing towards assigning also the probability that the coin is a fair coin (or generally such a coin that has a p of a certain value). That is also... (read more)
>Suppose that I have a coin with probability of heads . I certainly know that is fixed and does not change as I toss the coin. I would like to express my degree of belief in and then update it as I toss the coin.
It doesn't change, because as you said, you "certainly know" that p is fixed and you know the value of p.
So if you would like to express your degree of belief in p, it's just p.
>But let's say I'm a super-skeptic guy that avoids accepting any statement with certainty, and I am aware of the issue of parametrization dependence too.
In that case use Bayes' Theorem to update your beliefs about p. Presumably there will be no change, but there's always going to be at least a tiny chance that you were wrong and your prior needs to be updated.
Why do so many technophiles dislike the idea of world government?
I rarely see the concept of "world government", or governance, or a world court or any such thing, spoken of positively by anyone. That includes technophiles and futurists who are fully cognizant of and believe in the concept of a technological singularity that needs to be controlled, "aligned", made safe etc.
Solutions to AI safety usually focus on how the AI should be coded, and it seems to me that the idea of "cancelling war/ merely human economics" -- in a sense, dropping our tools wherever humanity is not focused entirely on making a safe FAI -- is a little neglected.
Of course, some... (read more)
Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton
Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.
(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn black or white each round, contained a series of numbers in each cell, which change predictably and in some logically clever way according to... (read more)
"""The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?
I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or “emerge” from the interaction of many low-level elements. (Wikipedia: “The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”)
Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying “It’s not a quark!” Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying... (read 456 more words →)
Why shouldn't the accused in criminal cases be forced to represent themselves in court?
I'm going to quote from one of the top results from searching this general type of question--
But presumably the judge has a full understanding of the relevant laws by the time he or she hears the case...or another neutral expert ought to...with all the benefit of modern... (read 531 more words →)